News from FIU Medical Library: Upcoming live webinar: Drug Desensitization

UPCOMING LIVE WEBINAR
Drug Desensitization:
Mechanisms and Pharmacological Candidates

Prof. Mariana C. Castells
Harvard Medical School, USA

Drug allergy and hypersensitivity are growing health care concerns, which encompass a new discipline that is being led by allergists and clinical immunologists.

In the last 25 years, there has been an explosion in the number of new targeted drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies and small molecules, that address personalized diseases. These drugs have been used for the growing population that’s in need of curative treatments for cancer and improved quality of life for chronic, autoimmune, and inflammatory diseases. New symptoms and phenotypes have emerged with new therapies, and patient safety is compromised when they are re-exposed to first line treatments, which have induced a reaction.

Desensitization, a novel ground-breaking procedure that utilizes mast cell inhibitory mechanisms, is now available to safely provide first line therapies to patients with drug-induced hypersensitivity reactions.

Wednesday, November 15
5pm GMT (12pm EST)

About the Speaker

Mariana Castells, M.D., Ph.D. is a clinician-scientist with over 30 years of experience in allergy and immunology. She is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School with over 200 publications and Director of the Brigham and Women’s Mastocytosis Center – one of the few nationally and internationally recognized centers of excellence, which provides diagnosis, management, and treatment options for patients with mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders. These are rare and potentially deadly disorders which are currently addressed using Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors. Additionally, she is Director of the Drug Hypersensitivity and Desensitization Center at Brigham and Women’s and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which for the last 20 years has provided over 900 high risk desensitization’s per year for patients with cancer, severe infections and inflammatory diseases, who are allergic to their first line therapy, thereby increasing their life expectancy and quality of life.

Webinar Sponsor:
The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection

A collection used by universities, medical schools and global pharmaceutical companies in over 60 countries around the world. The collection contains over 3,000 specially commissioned seminar-style talks and interviews ranging from the fundamentals of life sciences to the latest developments in therapeutic interventions, from the level of the single molecule to entire populations. The content is arranged in subject areas and includes both advanced and introductory-level talks. New talks are published every month. The collection is ideal for faculty, post-docs, other researchers and both graduate and undergraduate students.